Jiahui Yu is leaving Meta to start a new company. Yu joined Meta from OpenAI last year, teaming up with Mark Zuckerberg and Wang Tao to form TBD Lab and lead multimodal research. A little over a year later, he's heading out to go solo.
While at Meta, Yu worked on Muse Spark, Voice Mode, Muse Image, and Muse Video. He left right after Muse Spark updated to version 1.2. He says he's been increasingly drawn to a question that is "critical to humanity's future" but "currently explored by very few people," and he plans to devote his full energy to it. The new company's name and direction haven't been announced yet.
Before Meta, Yu led OpenAI's perception team and contributed to Google DeepMind's Gemini multimodal research. When Meta formed its Superintelligence Lab last year, he was one of the core researchers Zuckerberg recruited away from OpenAI.
Yu joined Meta at the peak of Silicon Valley's AI talent wars. At the time, Meta was reported to be offering a handful of top talent total compensation exceeding $100 million in the first year, though the company later denied that all core employees got that level. There's no evidence Yu personally received a $100 million salary.
https://twitter.com/jiahuiyu/status/2087936732939616299?s=46